Greek recipes from an English kitchen

Autumn in Greece arrives surreptitiously – it creeps stealthily through September and most of October with such a gradual readjustment of temperature and sunlight that summer feels almost endless. Spending this time in the southern Aegean we have been truly spoilt – swimming in warm seas well into the second week of this month – but…

What is it about glimpsing an island on the horizon that immediately fills you with the need to go there and get a closer look. The compulsion to travel to lands that we can merely glimpse from afar must be one of the oldest desires of mankind. I defy anyone to resist that simple urge…

For someone who is an extreme Philhellene, I have a confession to make. Don’t worry – I’m not about to admit to a deep dislike of sapphire seas and sunlit vistas. I am not going to ‘fess up to an antipathy to the fruits of the olive tree or, an abhorrence of the aubergine. The…

There is always a conundrum if you are a bit of a creative cook – do you stick with the absolutely traditional recipes or do you try to ring a bit of a change? Things cannot be fixed in aspic – and after all, who eats aspic anymore? I rest my case. In a way,…

When you think about the reasons why Greece, and particularly Athens, have been in the press over the last few years, Oscar Wilde’s well-known maxim may not be the first thing that springs to mind. Famously he said ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not…

Air travel is a curious thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a novice, I’ve been doing it for more than 40 years, but it never ceases to bemuse me. One minute you’re at some soulless U.K. airport at stupid o’clock, with seemingly endless groups of bleary people – wide-eyed kids trailing ‘trunkies’ and lads…

The definite evidence for one of my ‘guilty secrets’ is the piles and piles of cookery books that I seem to have acquired over the years. Some are real ‘workhorses’, referred to for the basics; a quantity of pancake batter or the perfect proportions for a classic vinaigrette. Others are filled with beautiful photography and…

Well, it’s that time of year again. For the last few weeks we, here in UK that is, know that we are approaching Lent – well let me re-phrase that – we know that Easter is on the horizon. The hot cross buns have been on the supermarket shelves since early January, and, believe it…

For more reasons than I care to name here, I have been cooking a lot of ‘comfort food’ of late. I am sure that ‘comfort food’ has always been with us but I suspect that it is only the modern luxury of food choice and the self-awareness of our times the has made it a…

It is arguably, the most famous but also the most maligned of all Greek dishes. Unfortunately most visitors to Greece do not experience home-cooked moussaká, instead eating it at touristy tavérnes. There it seems to have two incarnations – either as a congealing, solid, stripy slab or as a slop, served in individual ceramic pots. Neither…